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4.16.2013

Boston is my home, the place where I can reach out and touch nearly all the people I love most in the world. I spent most of yesterday trying to make contact with each one of them - everyone goes to the marathon, you know, everyone crowds around the finish line - and those endless endless spans of radio silence between, “I’m okay, are you okay?” and “Yes, yes, I’m okay, I’m safe” were awful, dark and twisted paths that my brain lit up with screams and sirens. The news kept pouring in - another bomb, another, a fire, the dead, the injured. There was blood all over the sidewalks. There was bloodall over the fucking sidewalks.

Yesterday was measured in heartbeats.

But everyone I love is safe. So that is something. A selfish, overwhelming something, for which I am so, so grateful.

And then there was the sheer outpouring of goodness, the number of people who ran toward the explosions, the offers of housing and money and whatever people could give, the messages from everywhere - We stand with you, we’re here for you, we’re here… It’s dizzying, that kind of love. Over and over, it brought me to tears. Because this is what we do, we humans. When it comes down to it, we just really and truly and fiercely love the shit out of each other.

Still, I called in to work today. When I woke up this morning and thought about going in - climbing into a metal tube, winding through underground tunnels into the heart of the city, sitting all day at a desk in a federal building - my anxiety-disordered brain was having none of it. Part of me thinks, “This is the point. This is what it means to sow fear. You have to be stronger than this.” The other part of me just keeps thinking of how afraid all of those people must have been. How terrified, in those moments, under a bizarrely sunny sky, when everything was torn apart.